Giovanni Parenti (1947–2000)—the editor of and the mind behind the anthology Poeti latini del Cinquecento—worked for more than two decades to collect, study, philologically edit, comment upon, and translate a wide-ranging corpus of poetical works written in Latin by Italian authors during the sixteenth century. His sudden death in January 2000 prevented him from completing his project and seeing it published. From 1978—when the editorial plan was drafted—until his death, Parenti had the chance to devote his time only to fewer than half of the authors he wanted to anthologize. The scholarly contribution and the erudite findings that his work (albeit partial) carried with it called for almost unprecedented measures to bring it to light. It was thanks to the prolonged and commendable efforts of Massimo Danzi, who—backed by the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento (and on the footsteps of the revising work already done by Domenico De Robertis and Giuliano Tanturli)—reviewed and edited Parenti's manuscript and brought it to life. The two volumes of Poeti latini del Cinquecento represent the pinnacle of both Parenti's academic efforts and Danzi's scholarly and editorial ones.

This anthology collects a rich corpus of Latin verse by various sixteenth-century Italian authors. It includes more than 5,400 lines, taken from the works of sixteen poets (Guido Postumo Silvestri, Pierio Valeriano, Iacopo Sadoleto, Francesco Maria Molza, Giovanni Cotta, Baldassarre Castiglione, Celio Calcagnini, Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, Pietro Bembo, Andrea Navagero, Benedetto Lampridio, Marcantonio Flaminio, Marco Girolamo Vida, Girolamo Fracastoro, Niccolò d'Arco, and Giovanni Della Casa). As this list shows, while choosing the authors to include in his anthology, Parenti followed Carlo Dionisotti's approach to the study of Italian sixteenth-century literature, by selecting excerpta from the works of literati working not just in Tuscany but in various other regions of Italy. In comparison to other major anthologies of Renaissance Latin verse (e.g., Laurens-Balavoine, Anthologie de la poésie latine de la Renaissance [1975], and Perosa-Sparrow, Renaissance Latin Verse [1979]), Parenti's selection, specifically focusing on sixteenth-century Italy, transports the reader back to the polyphonic voice of the peninsula's literary polycentrism in a more vivid and detailed way. The gamut of places from which the selected texts arise echoes that of the genres to which they belong. Indeed, within the anthology, one may find elegies, satires, hexametric epistles, odes, epigrams, religious epic poems, eclogues, hymns, and georgic, poetological, scientific, and didactic poems.

The only two genres that, despite being widely practiced in sixteenth-century Italy, appear underrepresented are epic and philosophical poetry. Yet, before raising this caveat, one should remember that the anthology that has been printed is less than half of the original work planned by Parenti. It is plausible that if he managed to accomplish the project as drafted, further poems pertaining to the two aforementioned genres would have been included (as it is suggested, for example, by the fact that in the 1978 plan—which has been reproduced in Danzi's introduction [11–12]—Parenti intended to devote a section of his anthology to Piero Angeli da Barga, author of the epic poem Syrias). A further glance at Parenti's original plan lets us appreciate that, among the various literati that the editor wanted yet did not have the chance to anthologize, there are a few whose literary production exceeds the threshold of the year 1550 (e.g., Benedetto Varchi, Bernardino Rota, and Onorato Fascitelli), unlike the work of almost all of the sixteen authors included in the two published volumes. This reminds us that, if Parenti had been able to finalize his planned work, the chronological scope of his collection would have been even larger than the one he achieved.

It is nonetheless true that, despite these potential addenda, the production of the vast majority of the poets encompassed in both the original and the accomplished plan sits in the first half of the Cinquecento. Still, this should not be seen as the result of an unbalanced choice. On the contrary, it attests to Parenti's willingness to mirror the cosmos of Latin verse in Renaissance Italy in his anthology, since, as scholarship has stressed (see, for instance, among the many others, Giancarlo Mazzacurati, Misure del classicismo rinascimentale [1967]; Carlo Vecce, “La filologia e la tradizione umanistica,” Storia letteraria d'Italia 7.1 [2007]: 193), the season of Latin poetry reached its peak in the peninsula during the first half of the Cinquecento. Among the poems belonging to this period, Parenti selected those to include in his volumes on the basis of refined and measured principles that aimed at stressing—to quote Danzi's introduction—the “rilievo storico della poesia,” the “fortuna sovranazionale dei testi,” and the “purezza del [loro] respiro poetico” (“the historical relevance of the poems,” “their reception within an international context,” and “the purity of their lyricism,” 27).

Turning now to the structure of the two volumes, each of their sixteen sections (each one devoted to a different poet) is divided into two main parts: an introduction and a selection of poetical texts. The introduction has four parts: one focusing on the biography of the author and the historical-cultural aspects of his production (this part often has the breadth and accuracy of an essay rather than of a simple introductory section); a philological section discussing the printed editions and the manuscripts of the poetic works of the author in question; a bibliographical section, which includes references to scholarship up to the year 2000 (when Parenti's work ceased), with no updates, unfortunately; and a shorter part explaining from which source(s) the poems are taken and providing a precise philological analysis of them. Indeed, Parenti studied the textual tradition of each work that he anthologized and did not simply quote previous anthologies or early modern editions; on the contrary, he provided philologically accurate texts for each selected poem, discussing his textual choices in this section of the introduction, as well as in some of the annotations to the texts.

The corpus of poems comes next. Almost all of them are poems reproduced in their entirety (because—unlike other anthology editors—Parenti extensively privileged whole texts to fragmented ones). Each poem is preceded by an overview focusing on its content and history. The critically edited Latin text follows, equipped with a rich set of annotations, in which the editor provides content-based explanations and points out both the sources and the literary features of the poem. What is worthy of mention is that these annotations refer to both the Latin (and Greek) tradition and the vernacular one. Parenti's attention to vernacular literature (typical of the introductory sections too) adds further value to his anthology and makes every poem appear more deeply linked to the contemporary context from which it sprouted. The anthologized text is accompanied by an Italian prose translation by Parenti himself (who recurs to a wide-ranging array of linguistic nuances to render the tones of the original poem in its Italian counterpart). The elegance of these translations is a further element of value in this extraordinary work.